ICrypto

Hotest Blockchain News in First Media Index

China’s Metaverse Is All About Work

Before Covid-19 shut down Guangzhou, authorities in the province in China’s subtropical south were preoccupied with another virus: dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that causes chills and muscle pains. The aedes mosquito that spreads the virus thrives in standing water, so officials in the central Tianhe district wanted to clear puddles from the roofs of buildings. But checking and monitoring all the rooftops—which mostly look like one another—was laborious and prone to error.

So in 2017 the district started using a system from HiAR, an augmented reality company. Local officials flew drones over the rooftops, marking any that had puddles. That information was then sent in real time to a dashboard, which teams on the ground could see through a graphic interface.

HiAR was founded in 2012, years before the term metaverse (coined in a 1992 American sci-fi novel, Snow Crash) was thrust back into the tech media by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the company formerly known as Facebook. The company was rebranded to Meta in 2021 as part of its pivot toward creating virtual worlds.

Featured Video

 

Chinese startups and tech investors are notoriously trend-driven, and many jumped on the metaverse bandwagon after Meta’s supposed pivot, trying to launch homegrown versions or to integrate virtual or mixed reality elements into consumer products. But the Chinese government, which exerts an enormous influence over the country’s tech sector, was also quick to get in on the metaverse, backing technologies it sees as strategic and setting rules to govern what can go on in this next iteration of cyberspace. That means that what’s emerging in China is very different from the metaverses envisioned in the West. While the metaverses proposed by Meta, Microsoft, and Decentraland are aimed at consumers, China’s virtual worlds are more about putting tech to work in supporting the economy.

“The Metaverse is a vague concept and every [company] is interpreting it in its own way,” says Brady Wang, an associate director at tech market research firm Counterpoint. “In China, it’s very much a government-led concept.”

The metaverse often seems like a nebulous idea—a catchall term for virtual or augmented reality and virtual worlds, which overlaps with other unresolved terminology such as Web3. At its most basic form, it’s a merging of digital and physical spaces. More ambitious imaginings have it as a new kind of internet, with assets that move from virtual to physical, with its own economies and currencies—a vision that often brings it into contact with the blockchain and cryptocurrency industries.

In December 2021, China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, a body that, among other things, is responsible for investigating corruption within the Communist Party, published the state’s definition of the metaverse. It declared that the metaverse is composed of three technologies—digital twins (detailed virtual representations of real-world objects), mixed reality (spaces that merge digital and physical experiences), and the blockchain. But in a demonstration of the Party’s willingness to shut down sectors that it feels run counter to its long-term vision, the authorities had already knocked down that third pillar by effectively banning cryptocurrencies in September 2021.

Share
 26.04.2023

Hotest Cryptocurrency News

End of content

No more pages to load

Next page